HDP co-chair defends PYD against Turkish government

ANKARA - Doğan News Agency

DHA photo

Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) co-chair Sehalattin Demirtaş has called the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) an “extension of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL),” while ruling out that the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) in northern Syria was attacking Turkey.

“What kind of an enmity against Kurds is this that they [the AKP] await a bombing in some part of the country just to accuse the PYD?” he asked during his address to the party deputies on Feb. 23. 

“Did the PYD throw a single stone at you from [Syria]? I am not talking about bullets but stones,” he said. 

“And then, they are calling us [the HDP] the terror extensions, etc. Is there any better terror extension than you [the AKP]? You are the extension of ISIL. And this is your hypocrisy. Our party keeps calling for peace as yours is doing all this and you expect us to remain silent. The AKP is a political extension of ISIL,” he said. 

The government is trying to solve the Kurdish problem by bombing Cizre in the southeastern province of Şırnak and the Sur district in Diyarbakır, he added, accusing the government of provoking young Kurdish people to join the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). 

The government says that ISIL and the PKK are similar but it does not fight as hard against the jihadist group as against the PKK, Demirtaş claimed. 

Some 500 young people joined the PKK after a 27-day curfew in the Silopi district of Şırnak, he also claimed.